Janice Dickinson, who pranced her way to fame by modeling in magazines like Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Cosmopolitan, is getting even with the world that fed her bad habits. She’s hosting her own reality show.
“The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency” premieres at 9 p.m. Tuesday on Oxygen. Dickinson insists this is different from “The World’s Next Top Model,” on which she was one of the most gruff of judges–pointing to a line of hopefuls and pronouncing “yes, no, no, no, yes.” On her show she will be interviewing women for actual jobs, not for a showy process of elimination.
“This is not a contest,” said executive producer Stuart Krasnow. “…What we are banking on is Janice’s eye and her ability to spot talent and her ability to deal with people and get them to the point where they can really get a model ready to work.”
He said the show will follow models in the work experience. “If somebody gets fired on our show … they are really fired,” he said. “And Janice will be doing the firing, the hiring and the running of the business.”
Dickinson, who began modeling at 14, doesn’t have much good to say about the industry which catapulted her to notoriety before she was 20. “Every magazine cover you see of Halle Berry, Sarah Jessica Parker, Julia Roberts is completely airbrushed,” she said.
“It’s all completely digitally enhanced. Every photograph taken of Tyra [Banks] is completely airbrushed. We have been giving young girls and boys a sense of falseness …”
“You look at something and then get depressed because you wake up–‘I woke up this morning looking like [bleep]. I mean, how am I going to get through the day? I just don’t feel that good.’ So in fashion and photography, in essence, we fool people. In this show we are going to try to repair that.”
Dickinson, 53, says that the frantic obsession among young women to be thin as a micron is nothing new. But modeling exacerbates the tendency for girls to try to be cadaverous.
“I’m a former bulimic myself, and it’s just a horrible, horrible addiction that one–like anything else, gambling, chocoholism, alcoholism–it’s all the same–addictions,” she said. “It’s terrible.”
